[MFLoon]

I agree that the world is a complex system, but I don't actually agree that all or most of my actions as a private individual have wide reaching consequences. If you're below a certain critical threshold of wealth, power, social influence or some combination thereof, it really just doesn't matter what you do, it's the law of large numbers. The butterfly effect is a rare exception in complex systems, not a regularity - COVID Patient 0, for example, took actions that had wide reaching consequences, but I wouldn't consider those actions to have been "fundamentally political". Both the impact and the opportunity cost of the vast majority of my actions or inactions, on the greater world, is close to zero. People trying to convince you that "you can make a difference" in your everyday life as a private citizen by voting, recycling, showing up at the protest, boycotting the right products, etc, are in fact lying - they can, potentially, make a difference by causing a wide enough cross-section of a population to change their behaviors, but you the individual are not acting with wide reaching consequences, you are simply shuffling between indifferent behavioral cohorts which will continue to exist in the same proportions regardless of your individual choices.